What
could be easily dismissed as simple gag comics easily refract under
scrutiny into social commentary of the highest order. By casting the
everyman as shit, Poop
Office goes
swiftly Swiftian in its satire.

Through
page after page of diatribe disguised as one-liners, Poop
Office dissects
the modern world better than any social commentator or political
pundit. You have to be open to this shit to let it seep in, and once
it does, the stink of its message will bring you to tears.”

8. Loud Comix
written by a group of leading lights from the Southern Punk Rock
scene and illustrated by Jamie Vayda

These
are Comix, after all, and Comix don’t take no crap. Comix ain’t
for the sensitive or the dainty or the social justice advocate; they
are all about tits and booze and cocks and drugs and fucking and
shitting and screaming. And Loud
Comix is
hollering all this louder than anything else you got going on right
now. A matter of fact, it’s got its own PA system and they’ve
turned those volume knobs all the way up.

The
mid-twentieth century Italian writer and translator Cesare Pavese
once wrote,“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust
strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and
friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the
essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things
tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” Jesse
Jacobs' new graphic novel, Safari
Honeymoon,
from Koyama Press upends Pavese's idea to a certain extent. In Safari
Honeymoon even
the things we hope to see as eternal have become almost
unrecognizable, beyond perhaps what we can understand. Part jungle
adventure, part “psychedelic sojourn”, part biblical allegory,
part gender study, part contemporary commentary, Safari
Honeymoon is
much more than the sum of its parts; it becomes its own thing by
being unlike almost anything else.

Through
Theth,
Bayer conveys the pathos and poignancy of feeling unconnected and
adrift in a world that makes little sense, which is populated by
people who are cruel and self-serving. It's a messy place to walk
through and Thethis
a messy comic.

Madeleine
Flores' Bear,
Bird and Stag were Arguing in the Forest (and other stories)from
Retrofit/Big Planet is kind of like the baby sloth photo of small
press releases insomuch as it allows you pleasant pause from your
day-to-day bringing a much needed joy break. It works those ill-used
muscles in your dour face that tighten only when you smile.

Flores
is a positive light here. The four stories contained in Bear,
Bird and Stag were Arguing in the Forest (and other stories)are
exulting, playful, deeply satisfying, and nearly perfect. Each piece
demonstrates the extent of her artistic abilities, as they are
stylistically rendered separate from each other, using the tone of
the art to further the tone of her intention.

Homesick
wants our participation in the experience on an instinctual level.
There's little didacticism, although there is plenty of manipulation.
As if almost a poet, Walz conveys the hues and shades of his
sensitivities. Through the synergy of words and pictures, negative
space and dark washes, open panels and tight details, each page is
suffused with Walz's sensibilities. He trusts the empathy of his
audience to feel something. He knows we all know someone who's died,
is dying, or will die soon.

Poetry
comics (or comics poems) are unlike anything I’ve experienced
before with either form by itself. Something new happens when you
take the visual efficiency of comics and suffuse it with the lexical
efficiency of poetry. Vice-versa, when the imagistic language of
poetry is illuminated with the linework of comics, some of your
synaptic junctions alight with new intensity in the process of
understanding. It’s exquisite and gorgeous and graceful and a feast
for your brain and your eyes.

I've
been saying all along that Eel
Mansions has
been a canticle to the creative act – that's the problem now here's
the hook. How Van Gieson ends this series is all about how Van Gieson
wants his series to end. Ain't nobody's business but his own. All
along he has been helming this ship, fore and aft, rutting while
ruddering as it were. It is his offspring and he's setting the rules
to how this baby is to be raised. A child born from what Keith Silva
called 'the anxiety of influences' is bound to sublimate intention
into the miasma of ingenuity.

Once
we cage our chaos in form, the art therein becomes a gift for other
apes to ponder as they secretly shudder at the self-portrait it casts
back.

Such
is the stuff of Conor Stechschulte's debut graphic novel, The
Amateurs, a book that explores the nature of self as defined by
action, as much as it reveals the simian beneath.

Ostensibly,
The Amateurs is about two butchers who have forgotten how to
do their job. It is encased in a framing device hinting at witchcraft
and burgeoning female sexuality, and is sub-plotted by a brief
commentary on the repression inherent in the roles we are expected to
place in our day-to-day. It is surreal, it is engaging, and it is
violent.